So you’ve built a first release of your product and you’re ready to get it into the hands of users. The feature set seems solid for this first iteration, but is it? If you haven’t put together a solid plan for how your product will grow, you should take a step back and figure it out because an engine of growth is your most important core feature.

It’s taken a few passes at doing products for me to finally come to this realization. An engine of growth is so important, that not having a good one would be enough to stop working on any future product I do.

So, what are common engines of growth? Here are some, in no particular order, that are popular ways to get your product in front of more eyeballs and growing.

SEM/Paid Advertising

Advertising has long been used to draw attention to products, whether it’s laundry detergent, a new car model, or a web application. There is certainly a place for advertising, but the biggest problem with it for startups is that it drains a precious resource: cash. Advertising is expensive and unless you can get your cost of acquisition down, then you’re wasting money and potentially a lot of it.

The other problem with paid search is that with many startups, their users don’t even know they need what you’re selling. Depending on your product, this can limit the effectiveness of advertising considerably.

Do whatever you can to leave paid advertising to the big brands in the world that need to maintain their brand, not grow their business.

SEO/Content Creation

Recently, content creation and inbound marketing have been hot trends in marketing. It’s so hot, there are even startups popping up that help businesses make more and more content. Search engine optimized content is great because if you’re doing it well, you’re educating your potential user and building their trust. If a user has gained value from your writing, then they will likely feel comfortable with your product and want to give it a try. It might take a while to get to that point, but it can be very effective. Just look at KISSmetrics to see a prime example of how creating and spreading useful content (blogs, infographics, tweets, etc) gets people into their ecosystem and turns them into users.

The problems with inbound marketing are that it takes a ton of resources and time. As an entrepreneur, you probably want to be spending time on your product, not creating content to attract people your way. But, going the content creation route means you’ll either need to spend your time producing that content or spending money to have it created. Also, there is no way to know how long it will take to convert readers of your blog to customers of your product. Months or years could pass before a reader consuming your content becomes a paying user of your product.

Sales

I’ve never been a fan of the art of selling (either as the buyer or seller), so I can’t claim to be an expert. That said, some products need a salesforce. In my experience, these products that need to be sold by a sales team are expensive because they need to have high enough margins to justify the expense of the sales force itself. Expensive products need rich customers, which is why enterprise products usually work very well with a sales team leading the effort to get new customers.

If you’re relying on sales, I’d get ready to do the sales by yourself in the early going. When money’s tight and your product needs to get in the hands of customers, the light will be shining very brightly on you.

Press

With Onepager, we were very lucky and appreciative to get some great press early on. We have a story that reporters are interested in and they feel fits well into their streams of content. The spikes of users after various mentions in articles have been impressive and incredibly motivating to our team. We’ve also generated lots of new free and paid users from press. I definitely encourage any startup to get the attention of press when they want a traffic boost.

The problem with press is that, as I mentioned, it’s a spike and isn’t very sustainable. I look at press as a bonus and not as much of a long-term strategy. After a day or two, new visitors will drop from the press you’ve received. If you haven’t devised a good way to keep a portion of those users engaged with your product (maybe you were able to get their email address or they’ve created an account), then your opportunity will be largely lost.

Word of Mouth

A trusted friend telling you about a product they use and enjoy is powerful. There probably is no more convincing way to have a user learn about your product. Your users are selling it for you, which is an amazing effect.

We’ve experienced a good deal of “word of mouth” advertising at Onepager. It’s helped us grow and has also contributed to our very passionate user base. The problem we have is that there isn’t a logical way to incorporate this user to user spreading into the product itself. There are certainly ways to do that, you just need to have the right type of product to make it happen effectively.

Inherent Virality

The digital version of “word of mouth”, inherent virality allows users to spread your product to their friends and peers just by using it. Their usage of it is an endorsement and is the best way to get a large amount of users and achieve the coveted network effect. The best things about incorporating virality into your product is that it’s free and highly effective.

Virality is the engine that’s powered many of the biggest sites on the internet (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc). If you’re aiming to have a huge user base, user to user spreading is the most effective, if not the only way.

The challenge with this approach is that you need to be able to incorporate viral aspects into your product. Invites, follows, sharing. All of those work, but not every product can incorporate any (let alone all) of the viral techniques used. It is especially challenging if your product doesn’t have a free option.

Start Tuning

This isn’t a comprehensive list of all the ways to grow your business, but it’s a good base to think of when envisioning how your product will grow after launch. Be sure to think about which mix of growth engines you’ll use before you launch so you can get into your growth pattern as soon as possible.

Diamond in the Rough is a jewelry company that recently launched a redesigned site and refreshed brand.  My team and I did the design and development of the site and it features what has proved to be a controversial tactic: to browse their product inventory, the user must create an account.

Why We Built a Walled Garden

Collecting user email addresses makes great business sense for all sorts of companies, but for Diamond in the Rough, it’s exceptionally important. Buying an engagement ring is a very long-tail purchase, typically taking 6-9 months of research. Email allows DITR to keep in contact throughout that research process and stay in the front of the user’s mind. We made the decision to do the walled garden pretty early on since we wanted to get and keep users engaged in the site and the brand.

Why We Almost Pulled the Plug

When we made the decision to do the walled garden, we weren’t totally comfortable with it ourselves. On one hand, users are getting used to this type of ecommerce situation with Gilt, Fab, Lot18, etc. On the other hand, those sites give you access to a deal on the goods they sell, creating a sense of exclusivity. Since every one of DITR’s products is unique (every rough diamond is different), we were betting DITR is positioned somewhere in the middle of these membership sites and a more common ecommerce store.

Still, we weren’t sure. DITR’s CEO was losing sleep at night about the wall and at one point, we debated switching the account creation requirement to just a newsletter signup. Despite all that and our friends we polled unanimously hating the registration requirement, we decided to forge ahead and be ready to pull the plug if users were turning away in droves.

Launch and Aftermath

Fortunately and amazingly, all of our fear and all of the discouragement we heard was unfounded. Users immediately started plugging in their email addresses to gain access to the inventory. We were shocked and amazed that our big gamble worked. After 2 weeks, DITR had collected 1,200 email addresses. That is definitely a successful number in our eyes.

The Problem With Opinions

Opinions and gut instincts are very important in decision making. It’s the quickest way to make a decision. Unfortunately, in this situation, nearly everyone thought we were crazy for our tactic. Failure was the popular opinion, but we wanted to test it anyway. In the end, the data disproved the majority of the opinions and validated the feelings of the minority.

Data is the ultimate proving ground for ideas. Do whatever you can to get useful data on any grey areas for your product so you can make definitive decisions and move on to the other challenges in front of you.

Recently I’ve been working hard to learn how to do some basic back-end programming. There are a ton of tools out there to use and the time seems right to try to build these skills. Here are two I’m using:

Treehouse

Treehouse is the product of the awesome Think Vitamin blog and Carsonified. They have a series of 5-10 minute videos that walk you through many aspects of web design, development, and iOS dev. The videos are super easy to follow and each section presents you with a test to validate you’ve learned what you’re supposed to.

It’s $25/mo and they are continuously adding new videos and subjects. I’ve been using it for a few weeks and have gone through all the HTML/CSS videos to solidify my skills there. Definitely been worth it so far and I’m looking forward to venturing into Ruby very soon.

Stanford’s OpenClassroom

I had heard of Stanford’s OpenClassroom project from a few people, but a friend just sent me a link to it today. Basically Stanford has taken several classes, videotaped them, and uploaded the videos to their site for your viewing. These are some of the best educators on the planet, so it’s safe to assume the material they give out is top-notch. I’ve only watched a few videos so far, but this will definitely supplement my Treehouse learning.

The only problem I see is these lectures are primarily created for a classroom of tuition paying students. It’s an awesome resource, but it’s an “as is” type of education.

There are several more sites out there like Codecademy and Code School that are all working to make us all a little smarter when it comes to being an engineer.

Yesterday I wrote about picking a company name and some questions to ask yourself when you’re in that process. Whenever we have new a new product or concept we’re putting together, the two tools we use more than anything else are Domainr and Namechk. Both usually don’t wind up showing you what you’re hoping for, but they get your results quickly, which lets you hit lots of dead ends and move on quickly with your searches.

Domainr

It’s been out for a few years, but there still isn’t a better domain search tool out there. Domainr uses AJAX to search for the domain you entered as well as other variants it feels like suggesting. Get an idea what you want to search for, enter it, and a second later you’ll see if it’s available or not.

One other note about domains. Don’t be afraid to reach out to an owner of a domain if it’s not being used. I’ve done this several times and I’m always surprised at how low the prices wind up being.

Namechk

Namechk is sort of like the Domainr for social media. Just enter your company name and Namechk will scan all of the major social networks to see if it’s available.

Obviously Facebook and Twitter are the most important to get, but it’s also a good idea to lock down as many other accounts you can. Why get a YouTube account if you don’t plan on using it? It’s actually an SEO tactic and a way of creating inbound links to your site. Search for “37 Signals” in Google and you’ll see how they control every result for the first page of the results.

Both of these tools are great ways to get information quickly and hopefully cut down on the excessive amount of time searching for a name usually takes.

Choosing a name for your startup is a big decision. Once you’ve chosen a name, it’s hard to change both legally and in the minds of your users, so be sure to think it through at the start. Here are some good questions to ask yourself when considering a name based on our experiences with Onepager.

Can you say it without spelling it?

While we haven’t had much luck getting onepager.com yet, our current domain name is really easy to say and understand: onepagerapp.com. When you’re giving out your URL and email often on the phone, if your name isn’t easy to say, you run the risk of having emails bounced and just general confusion be created.

Does it confuse your target audience?

Our original URL was “onepa.gr”. We thought it was cool and short. When we were getting closer to launch and started showing our users our progress, people were confused about the name. This was such consistent feedback, we knew we had to make a change. The URL we settled on is longer, but it’s made our lives and our customers lives easier.

Don’t be afraid to go longer in order to gain clarity. 37signals have gotten a lot of miles out of domain names that include “it,” “HQ,” and “now.”  I’d agree that having a great product name and not necessarily the .com to go with it is not a bad situation to be in.

Does your name lock you in to anything?

One thing our name fails us on is it determines one aspect of our product: one page. We’ve often talked about expanding beyond one page, but we always come back to the name and the conversation usually dies there.

Vinicius Vacanti of YipIt actually built a script to help them find their name. The name they wound up with allowed them to totally restart the product several times and still maintain the same name. Having that flexibility is a really nice attribute.

Spend some time on your name because hopefully you’ll be saying it and supporting it for years to come.

Psychology is critical for product designers to master and use with today’s new web products. “Ease of use” doesn’t motivate users like people once argued it did. It sounds sick, but you’ve got to manipulate people’s minds to build a wildly successful product.

Flash sales sites are probably the simplest example of how to employ psychological techniques successfully. Here are a few of the concepts they employ:

Scarcity

OK, this is a little bit of economics too. Scarcity is the concept that a resource is limited. When a user thinks the item they’re looking at isn’t going to be available much longer, there’s a strong incentive to act.

Fab.com shows you when inventory of a particular product is low and also shows the ones that have already sold out. It’s like they are saying, “Act quick to get this watch or you’ll miss out on this great product like you did on all these other ones.”

Curation

Giving the perception that items are curated by professionals that do the thinking for you removes a big barrier to buying goods online. Instead of relying on your own limited knowledge or reviews by other users, a professionally curated selection means you aren’t going to get a product that lets you down. “We know you’ll love this box of wine!”

Who has time to become a wine expert? Many of us would like to, but it’s too much work. Lot18 knows this and in addition to getting great deals on wine, they make sure you know you’re getting professionally selected wine that you and your guests will love.

Deals

Giving the customer the perception of saving money is a pretty timeless motivator. They all do this and don’t be surprised if the “retail prices” get more and more inflated as the economy improves!

Emails

Fred Wilson likes to remind people that email is a startup’s best friend. Unless your site is one of the 7 that people visit in their daily routine, email is critical to getting users re-engaged. In Fred’s post, Etsy’s number one driver of traffic to their site is their series of emails they send out.

OpenSky does a really great job of this as well. On their platform, you select the celebrities/influencers you’d like to follow. For some reason I followed Bobby Flay and now any time he posts a new product for sale, they email me about it.

It seems simple and obvious to be emailing your users, but I know myself and a lot of other product designers that have failed to have a thoughtful email strategy and it hurt.

You need to go beyond a simple email newsletter with product updates. Look at how successful social networks all have great email notification strategies.

So Many More

These sites do many other tricks to press people’s buttons and they are constantly adding new ones (Fab.com just added a public feed of all user activity on the site). There is a lot of innovation going on in ecommerce and it’s proving to be a war fought in the consumer’s mind.

Did you ever think peeking at your analytics is the first thing you should do before starting a new design? It is, and if you haven’t looked at the analytics for some of your sites recently, you’d be surprised what you see, particularly in the screen resolution area.

Resolution Overload

A few years ago, resolutions were limited to mostly the ones you can probably recite from memory. Today, there’s no way you could guess or assume you know the resolutions people are using to view your site. One site I built a few years ago had over 450 different resolutions visit with a month!

What To Look For

I like to look for a couple of things when starting a design.

1. Low-end desktops. I’ve been designing for 1024×768 wide for years now and I’d like to go beyond that. All the sites that impress me visually seem to be going wider and wider. If a low percentage of users (<5%) are at 1024 or less, that helps inform the decision to blow up the 960 grid or not.
2. Mobile Visitors. Understanding if users are visiting with mobile devices will help inform the decision to launch with a mobile site. If they are, then you’ve got some solid data to backup the decision to push for mobile design.

Know Your Users

The more you know about your users, the better the experience you can create for them. Tracking their screen resoltuions with analytics is an easy and painless way to get some more info before putting your pixels in place.

I got Path a week ago and I’m in full fanboi mode. The interaction design is killer and the fact that so few people know about it is a lot of fun. Everyone who’s on there is an early adopter, making the whole experience more exclusive and our little secret.

I find myself doing a lot of photo sharing and checking in with Path. I used to check in to a lot of locations with Foursquare, but I don’t see myself doing that any longer.

Why Checking in With Path is Better

Through the Foursquare API, Path lets me check-in through both services. I get  the best of both worlds: Foursquare credit/badges and a notch in my Path timeline. The badges and gamification of Foursquare are starting to get a bit old. They worked great on me for a while, but I haven’t been excited about getting a new badge or topping someone in the leaderboard for several months.

Path’s recognition seems a lot more worth my effort. I enjoy checking in to keep a record of the places I’ve been and having those laid out in a timeline makes more sense to me. Instead of badges, points, etc., Path check-ins are a mostly personal experience in keeping track of where I’ve been and when I was there. Much more useful to me.

Using This Technique for Other Apps

It’s funny because Foursquare pulled this trick many months ago by letting you update your Facebook/Twitter status with a check-in through their service. You could do it all in one place. Now the tables have turned and based on how the NY startup scene is suddenly heavily active on Path, I’m sure Foursquare has noticed.

This is an important tactic to consider when doing social apps. Not only should you allow people to find and import their friends from other networks, but allowing them to warm up to your experience by letting them still participate in their other networks is a great bridge to win them to your new and shiny service. Path is doing this and I’m sure the team at Foursquare is working hard to figure out how their users re-engaged with their app again instead of their API.

I talked to Courtney Boyd Meyers yesterday for an article for The Next Web. She was interested in design trends for the new year and I told her some of what I’m thinking will catch on.

Predicting Trends is Impossible

Forecasting in all things is guessing. It’s part looking at what’s happened recently and maybe throwing in a bit of what you want to have happen. No one predicts traffic will go down after it’s gone up a bit. With that said, I think there is at least one major design force coming up this year: increasing focus on mobile web design.

Why the Time is Finally Right For Everyone to Wakeup to Mobile

Designers are opening their eyes and realizing that consuming content on mobile devices is important. The number of mobile devices sold and used to access the web is staggering. Luke Wroblewski mentioned that it was predicted smart phone sales would outpace all PCs by 2012, only to have that milestone passed a full two years early. People are using their mobile devices more and more for their general internet usage and it isn’t slowing down.

The problem with designing for smartphones instead of PCs is that mobile users are a fickle bunch. Their motivations are different and less forgiving when they are using the web on a desktop. Attention is more fleeting with mobile users interested in very quick bursts of information to fill times when they are bored or in immediate need of info.

With such short attention spans, the focus of quality mobile experiences is on the content: giving users what they want as quickly as they can access it. Anything outside of the main content is very much secondary.

The Convergence

Lots of people have talked about Mac OS X and iOS converging in the near future as desktop and mobile computing become more and more similar. This is starting to happen with web experiences as well. Look at Twitter. Its new redesign is amazingly simple and focused almost like a good mobile web experience.

It makes sense that desktop web experiences get more simple and focus on the content. That’s what the user is  there for. If the content on your site is too hard to digest with excessive ads or multiple calls to action and paths through your site, that just adds mental weight to your user and makes their life more difficult.

Get to the Point

Luke Wroblewski’s book Mobile First argues that designers should think about the mobile version of a site before diving into the desktop version. Doing so forces focus on essential functions and content. That ultimately benefits the user on both the small and large screen. This idea of getting in and getting out as quickly as possible is spilling over from mobile to desktop. Mobile usage is shaping users to expect quick hits of information. That will be one of the major design topics in 2012 and give you reason to be clear with your message and drop any extraneous information or distractions.

Some friends have been commenting that I’ve been writing most every day on this blog after years of relative neglect. It’s true, I’m making a concerted effort to sit down and write one thoughtful (debatable) post every weekday.

Why It’s Important to Me

I’m not really trying to go out of my way to have lots of people read my posts. Frankly, the quality and insight is low at this point. I’m alright with that though. I’m not really writing for a big audience. My motivations are to record my thoughts at a very dynamic time in my life and to get better at writing.

I’ve never been a terrible writer, but never have I felt like I’ve been particularly good. Improving in this is important to me and the only way to do that is to write and write some more. There will definitely be a lot of uselessness during the process I’m putting myself through, but hopefully there will be a few nuggets that are useful to someone who stumbles in. Maybe once I get to the point that I believe I’m a great writer I’ll slow down. Until then, I’m going to write as close to daily as I can.

The Importance of Content Creation

Creating valuable content is such a huge asset in modern life. So many businesses use inbound marketing as the primary way they attract customers and I love that approach. Creating value for someone outside of your product is the best way to show you know what the hell you’re talking about. Letting someone know you, your company, and how you can help them before they commit to you is pretty powerful and authentic. Doing all this is a way to get to the point where I can contribute at that level.

Control

The other thing I like about writing on a blog is that it’s something I can control. That’s not some megalomaniac comment, even though it might sound like it. There’s just so many things that seem out of my control that at least I can do this and have final say over how it goes.

All of these things culminated in my decision to start pumping out more content. I hope the benefits of it can go beyond just myself.